BuddyPress doesn’t let you set or view the avatars in the wp-admin areas, so that’s a bit of a red herring. So, when you go to upload an avatar, how far do you get? Can you crop the image and save it OK? And then there’s just nothing in that person’s profile picture (“mystery man”?)?

Have you tried looking inside your wp-content/uploads/ folder to see if the images are being saved?
Are there any error messages in your web server’s PHP log file?
Are you running on multisite, and if so, if BuddyPress running on blog ID #1, or?

I can infact see the avatars in the WordPress dashboard, right there on the first page, under “recent comments” and again in the “users” section. When I select “crop image” it says “Your new avatar was uploaded successfully!” and it keeps showing the mystery man. The avatars are uploading fine, they’re in the directory, and displaying properly in the dashboard. However, any page that is supposed to display the avatar image (outside of the dashboard) is still displaying and also fetching the mystery man image, according to the source code when viewed in the browser. I just have the one domain, I’m using “public_html” as my root, which is 1 directory deeper than the actual root, as set up by my server. There hasn’t been any error reports (my error log is still empty).

Not clear whether you answered DJPaul – Did you look inside your wp-content/uploads/ folder to see if the images are being saved?

Deactivate all plugins except BuddyPress and change to bp-default theme, clear cache. Check if avatars show up in front end. If not, upload avatar and see if it was properly uploaded in server –> wp-content/uploads/

I have a similar problem …
New images are saved on the server but not in the right place :
../wp-content/uploads/avatars/hash-bpthumb.jpg instead of ../wp-content/uploads/avatars/{$id}/hash-bpthumb.jpg

The problem is the path is not correctly set by bp …
I’m looking into the code for a quick fix.